Finding Decent Cherries in a Bad Year

The on-and-off-and-on-again spring weather messed with New Yorkers’ internal calendars this year. Worse, it clobbered the Northeast’s cherry crop. The season promises to be short and prices high ($5/pint and $6/pound are typical), and the current crop is probably as good as it’ll get.

Still, at the 97th Street Greenmarket on the West Side, LNG212 scored a couple of winners: firm, sweet cherries from Kernan Farms in New Jersey and deeper red, slightly less sweet ones from Locust Grove Fruit Farm in the Hudson Valley (the latter sells at other Greenmarkets as well). But the Greenmarket stamp is no guarantee of quality, cautions erica; at the Union Square Greenmarket, cherries from another Hudson Valley farm, Terhune Orchards, were shiny and unblemished but tasted almost bitter.

Hounds less committed to locavore purity have found pretty good cherries of unknown sourcing for as little as a buck a pound at fruit stands in Chinatown. comiendosiempre picked up white cherries at two pounds for $5. “They were good. Not peak-of-the-season good, but all were plump and mostly sweet.”